Where Are the Christian Churches When We Need Them Most?

Friday, May 20, 2011

By Paul Martin

by Mark R. Crovelli

LewRockwell.com
One of the most important functions of religious faith, observed St. Thomas Aquinas, is to allow people of limited intelligence and people with limited time for study to know important truths about God without having to investigate them personally. After all, few ordinary people are in a position to spend years rationally investigating the tenets of their faith, so, if they are to have any chance at finding Truth during their lives, they need to have it prepackaged for them to swallow on faith alone with the assistance of the Church.

This infinitely wise observation is just as true today as it was in the thirteenth century, and the Christian churches would do well to remember it during these especially turbulent political and economic times. In fact, with the world’s masses aflame with revolutionary ideas at the very same time that governments are going bankrupt, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to remind their unthinking, gullible, and emotional flocks of what is true and just and good. If they fail to do this, and right quick, there is a very real and dangerous possibility that the Christian masses will get swept away by exciting and profoundly immoral ideas that will doom Western civilization for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, the Christian masses desperately need to have the foundations of Christian ethics beaten into their dense skulls to keep them on the right path during these hours of intellectual temptation. Since many of the ideas floating around the world right now are both alluring and morally dangerous, the Christian masses need a simple set of criteria by which to judge what is right and what is wrong. Fortuitously, God was provident enough to provide Christians (and Jews and Muslims) with a list of ten moral criteria so undemanding that even the most intellectually challenged among them should be able to determine right from wrong.

The list contains two ethical commandments of especial importance today because of the extreme danger that the Christian masses will unthinkingly violate them. The first and most important is that it is wrong for Christians to kill people. One would think that the Christian masses would have been able to memorize and abide by this simple proscription in the two thousand years that Christians have been walking the Earth, but apparently the density of the mass man’s mind continues to defy penetration. Christians in recent years are definitely no less likely to kill than any other peoples, and the danger is that they will kill even more frequently in coming years as economic and political conditions deteriorate further.